Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield (1953- ) published her first poem in 1973, shortly after graduating from Princeton as a member of the university’s first graduating class to include women. She put aside her writing for nearly eight years, however, to study at the San Francisco Zen Center. “I felt that I’d never make much of a poet if I didn’t know more than I knew at that time about what it means to be a human being,” Hirshfield once said. “I don’t think poetry is based just on poetry; it is based on a thoroughly lived life. And so I couldn’t just decide I was going to write no matter what; I first had to find out what it means to live.” 

A Small-Sized Mystery

Leave a door open long enough,

a cat will enter.

Leave food, it will stay.

Soon, on cold nights,

you’ll be saying “excuse me”

if you want to get out of your chair.

But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat

is “excuse me.”

Nor Einstein’s famous theorem.

Nor “The quality of mercy is not strained.”

In the dictionary of Cat, mercy is missing.

In this world where much is missing,

a cat fills only a cat-sized hole.

Yet your whole body turns toward it

again and again because it is there.

— Jane Hirshfield